


Pale Luminescence

by rainstormcolors



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-12 22:00:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10500306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainstormcolors/pseuds/rainstormcolors
Summary: Short stories with hinted Rivalshipping.





	1. Pale Luminescence

**Author's Note:**

> An old dabble. I wasn't sure when/if I'd add more, so this chapter named the collection.

The massive room was inside a massive house. The world outside the tall windows shimmered apple-flesh-colored, letting in feathered light, flecks in the air like luminous plankton. Yugi Mutou looked into the face of the young man in the wheelchair. The man’s eyes were half-open and like glass. There was someone still inside there. Perhaps he should have hated him. But seeing him like this: catheter, IV, defenseless, a shell. The quietly devastating way Mokuba had looked at him as he entered the massive home. And also somehow, Yugi felt hopeful. That what had gone wrong in him was being righted. And so he looked at the man with soft eyes.

Yugi (gently): “We’re waiting for you. So please hurry and wake up…”

.

Sunshine colors melt through the window. The other students have left. With his book bag slung around his shoulder, Yugi shuffles into the empty classroom. But it isn’t empty. In the corner of the room, haloed in watery luminescence, Seto curls over his desk. Curious, hesitantly, Yugi steps closer. He’s struck by the calmness of Seto’s face. Somehow the sight makes him feel happy. He sits at a near-by desk and works on a few meager things. Just busy work.  
Then he hears a small noise, a whimper. When he looks he sees Seto wincing, tight-mouthed, tears beading in the corners of his clenched eyes. Yugi’s own eyes widen. He immediately thrusts nearer.  
Yugi (tugging Seto’s shoulder): “Kaiba-kun!”  
Seto wakes with a start. His hand slides to his forehead as his irises quiver.  
Seto: “Y-Yugi…?”  
Yugi: “Are you alright?”  
Yugi’s hand still rests on his shoulder. Seto’s eyes seem glazed. The tears are still there.  
Yugi: “It looked like you were having a nightmare so…”  
Seto: “You… you were watching me sleep?”  
Yugi (retracting his hand and scratching his cheek): “Well, it sounds kind of creepy when you put it like that…”  
Seto clenches his teeth. He crashes his fist down onto his desk, hard enough to bruise.  
Seto (beginning as a growl): “Shut up. Just shut up!”  
There’s a tremor in his movements. His face collapses into his hand.  
Yugi: “Are you okay?”  
Seto: “What do you care?!”  
Yugi: “Of course I care-“  
Seto stands unsteadily and stumbles. Yugi catches his arm. Seto violently rips it away.  
Seto: “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!”  
Yugi: “Kaiba-kun-“  
Seto (shrieking): “I said leave me alone!”  
He slams his fist into the window and there’s a silvery chime as the glass fractures into comets.  
Yugi: “Kaiba-kun…”  
A line crosses his hand. A ridge of glossy red oozes. Seto is suddenly very still, watching the red grow out like roots. Yugi hastily pulls the grey-and-black scarf from his bag.  
Yugi (holding it out to him): “Here.”  
Seto takes it numbly but seems clumsy with his grip. And so Yugi helps him swaddle his hand.  
Yugi leads Seto to the school’s infirmary. Seto follows him without words. Soft light filters through the curtains, thin as tissue paper, making the room lavender-tinted and dream-edged. Yugi sits him on a bed and takes a roll of tourniquet from the nurse’s drawer, and Seto watches him as he does. Yugi takes a seat next to Seto on the bed, leaving half a foot between them.  
Yugi: “Tell me if it’s too tight.”  
Yugi holds Seto’s torn hand and carefully, gently wraps tourniquet over the wound. He releases Seto’s hand.  
Yugi: “There. But I don’t know. You may need stitches. You should have a real doctor look at it.”  
Seto examines the work. Then he looks at Yugi.  
Seto: “I don’t understand you.”  
Yugi looks at Seto.  
Seto: “Why are you so kind to me. I’ve been nothing but cruel and cold to you.”  
Yugi: “You’re not social. That’s okay, I don’t mind.”  
Seto: “I’m not just asocial.”  
Yugi: “I don’t mind that you can be crabby. That’s just the way you are.”  
Yugi smiles at him.  
Seto: “I’m not a good person, Yugi.”  
Suddenly Yugi’s face changes, becomes something heavier.  
Yugi: “I don’t think you’re a bad person.”  
He pauses. His eyes drift away from Seto. Yugi kneads his fingers once.  
Yugi: “It’s not like I’ve forgotten what happened, but… you tried so hard to save Mokuba at Duelist Kingdom and you helped the Other–you helped Atem to beat Marik. Your inventions bring happiness to a lot of people. Please don’t think you’re a bad person.”  
A few moments pass. They don’t look to each other again. A piece of Seto’s tourniquet turns pink. He stands and begins to leave.  
Yugi: “You’ll be okay, right?”  
But Seto doesn’t answer.


	2. Games and His Heartbeat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by a prompt from Cryptographic_Delurk!

Once, when Yugi was small and cupped inside the warmth of his home, he watched a report on the news about how Gozaburo Kaiba was adopting two young brothers: the faces of the heirs of Kaiba Corporation, the arms dealer. One of the brothers was Yugi’s age. And this was the first time Yugi Mutou saw Seto Kaiba’s face, but he wouldn’t remember it.

Yugi had followed him outside the school. The sun hung low like a worn-out coin in an orange-tinged sky and the landscape was scratched by long shadows and pink-gold incandescence. The briefcase had landed hard on Yugi’s cheek, and Seto had glared back at him with cold piercing eyes, vomited out his words like acid. “ _I can’t believe you care about his sentimentality! He’s an old man! He doesn’t understand that winning is more important than anything!_ ”

Seto sat in the wheelchair with eyes like blue glass, hung somewhere between life and death; and Yugi watched him breathe. Their silhouettes spilled on the wall spelled something like hope. And how strange it was, with the fall of his eyelashes and the rose petal softness of his lips, that Yugi thought he looked pretty in a way.

At Duelist Kingdom, inside the cool blue of night as Seto stepped out from the helicopter, it took Yugi a moment to understand what he was seeing, the blurred reality of that man’s face and gestures and the elegant bend of his limbs like plant stems. “ _Hey Kaiba-kun!_ ” And so Yugi came to him and handed him his lost deck.

It had been a hole in Yugi’s heart, the day Atem left the world. The landscape was a paradox: everything was heavy and weightless, and the feeling pulsed like a river. And Seto Kaiba had ignored every email he’d sent about the date, but there he was, standing in the light and the heat and the shivering air of the desert. “ _Kaiba-kun…_ ”

They were surrounded by strangers and the sky was a void of dark holographic blue. And then Yugi put the pieces of the Millennium Puzzle together for the third time, and he knew the Puzzle was a corpse, and he had meant to put an end to the madness. But as he put those pieces together, he felt himself ripping apart the muscle of Seto’s heart. He saw the pain in Seto’s eyes.  
But there was nothing else he could do for him, and so he ripped the heart.

.  
.

Four years had passed since then, when Kaiba Corporation offered Yugi a position as a partner in game development, and Yugi took the offer. And that was when he met Seto Kaiba for the third time in his life.  
“You look well, Kaiba-kun.” Yugi smiled as he said it.  
Seto looked at him as if with suspicion, but then came the smallest hint of a genuine smile on his face as well. Yugi held out his hand, and Seto paused as if in confusion, but he placed his palm in Yugi’s and then they shook on their newborn partnership.

Sometimes Yugi told Seto stories. Sometimes they had coffee together.

The sky was the color of a bruise. Cold rain hissed, knocked flower petals from the trees in front of the Kame Game shop. The concrete was darkened and it emitted a smell of water and dust. A slow car, slice of the world reflected in its shell, parked nearby. The door of the car opened, opened by Yugi, and a translucent umbrella bloomed over his head. Seto slid out after him.  
“Go have a meal break or something,” Seto told the driver.  
Yugi and Seto raced to the shop from that spot, and Yugi fumbled with his keys as watery stars harvested on the umbrella and the world.  
The shop was unlit, closed for the day. And it was a small warm comforting place, shelves stuffed with toys and old-fashioned games.  
“What a dump,” Seto said.  
“That’s not very nice,” Yugi said teasingly, taking the comment in jest. Yugi closed his umbrella and left it leaning beside the door. He flicked on the lights and moved deeper into the shop. “Hey, you should pick out a game for us to play! Just pick one off the shelf.”  
Seto remained by the doorway but his eyes swam in the details of the room. “Are you joking?”  
Yugi began to search over the shelves. “Well, this is the store. There’s not much else to it. But these kinds of games can be a lot of fun, you know? Not everything needs holograms.”  
“My company’s profits say otherwise.”  
Yugi spoke gently as he pulled something from the shelf. “You can relax, Kaiba-kun. It’s just us here. It’s not like these games were ever a threat to your company’s profits.” He revealed a box colored like a picture book. “Here! I used to play this one with Jonouchi-kun and Ryo-kun sometimes. I remember it being a lot of fun.”  
Seto only stood, and Yugi lowered the box until his arms were limp. But finally Seto took the steps deeper into the heart of the shop. He bent down, looked over the colors and designs and names on the various boxes and merchandise. He found a small stuffed Blue Eyes White Dragon and picked it up, eying it with an expression Yugi couldn’t read.  
“I’ve always loved games,” Yugi said, “I guess it makes sense, being surrounded by them like this. But even when… even when I didn’t have any friends, they were always there and were something to play with, and I didn’t feel so lonely. Though most games need more than one player…”  
Seto looked at Yugi then. Yugi smiled weakly, a bit clumsy.  
“For those games I’m working on now, I kind of hope they can bring the same joy and comfort to other kids I guess. I don’t know,” Yugi said.  
“What’s that game you have?” Seto asked.  
Yugi lifted the box again, his face lighting. “It’s Carcassonne! It works better with more people but two can play. You build roads and cities until all the tiles are spent.”

They sat at a low wooden table. Yugi was the black player and Seto was the blue player. They built roads and cities until all the tiles were spent. Yugi was surprised, because despite never having played until today, Seto won. But then Yugi realized he had been playing it as a game while Seto had been analyzing each move, calculating the probabilities and points. Still though.  
“You really stomped me at my own game. Congratulations,” he said warmly.  
“It’s child’s play,” Seto said.  
“Thank you for playing it with me.”  
Suddenly they were both quite. Rain sizzled in the windowpanes and on the rooftop.  
“The house is just on the other side of that door. Would you like a drink or snack or something? I don’t think your driver’d be back yet. Grandpa’s probably home though.”  
From where he sat across from Yugi, Seto looked over the innards of the store. It was cozy. It reminded him of someplace from long ago.  
“Mokuba might like this place,” he said.  
“You should come together sometime.”  
“Don’t push it.”  
There was another pause. Yugi began to shuffle the pieces back into the box.  
“Kaiba-kun, I’m glad you came today.”  
“Whatever.”  
Seto stood and moved through the shop. He bent to the shelves.  
“How am I supposed to know which are two-player games? Am I going to have to pull out every box? Idiots should’ve listed the player numbers on the side,” he said.  
Yugi heard Seto’s voice as he closed the lid of the box. He watched the man searching the shelves, the slender limbs inside a dark trench coat, his soft brown hair.  
“Do you want recommendations?” Yugi asked warmly.  
“I can read just fine,” Seto said as his eyes poured over the back of a game box. “This one sounds stupid.” He shoved it back.  
Yugi let him pull out boxes and shove them back. He listened to Seto’s commentary about how dumb each one sounded. These games were something sacred to Yugi, and yet for all of Seto’s cutting words Yugi felt the sparkle of happiness in his heart. Because it was about more than the games.  
“I have regular playing cards too. We can play rummy or fifty-two pick-up,” Yugi said.  
Seto set down the box he’d been looking at and saw the apple sweetness on Yugi’s face. In turn, Yugi saw the consideration turning inside Seto’s stony blue eyes.  
“We’ll play rummy,” Seto said.  
Yugi stood to fetch a deck of plain old playing cards. “Rummy it is.”


	3. Monsoon Season

It’s one of the highest points of Domino City and Yugi stares out through the glass walls of Seto Kaiba’s office. He watches the purple and silver clouds, how in the distance beyond the ultramarine city, they pulse with a creamy glow.  
“Are you kidding me…”  
Yugi hears Seto growl this under his breath, Seto himself gazing into graphs and data formed only of light floating over his desk. Yugi has been waiting for Seto to finish his work before bothering him with the details of a new project, but the work goes on and on, and every time Yugi turns to look at Seto, Seto’s shoulders are hunched and his blue eyes are pinched. Turning to look at him now, Seto looks tired.  
“Kaiba-kun,” Yugi says softly.  
He’s ignored.  
He watches Seto work. The panels of light and data flick with the motion of Seto’s eyes. But Seto is stressed today. Yugi can tell. The tense jaw, the small breaks to breathe, but those breaks are too small.  
“Kaiba-kun,” Yugi says again, more firmly this time.  
“What?” Seto says without looking.  
Yugi doesn’t say the details of his new project and instead he says, “We should take off early today, go somewhere maybe.”  
Seto pauses.  
“Or maybe we can watch the storm roll in.”  
“What are you talking about?” Seto asks, “I don’t have time for babbling, Yugi.”  
Yugi turns back to watch the clouds, the lightning slowly seeping in from over the sea.  
He hears Seto exhale harshly.  
By the time Seto finishes his work, crystalline scratches of water are beginning to appear on the glass walls.  
“Now what did you want, Yugi?”  
And instead of bringing up the details of his new project, Yugi says, “Want to grab a bite with me before heading home?”

It had taken a few months of working together to get Seto to have the occasional drink or meal with him. It had been a surprise for Yugi back then, that after softly mentioning the idea on occasion and being told no over and over again, that it was Seto himself one day who’d asked Yugi to have a coffee with him. And they’d visited the tiny café on the second floor of the building, a place with lavender wisteria hanging from the ceiling that were in fact holograms. And that’s where they went now.  
They sit side by side at the counter space with simple sandwiches, and Seto has plain coffee and Yugi a latte with a shot of hazelnut flavor. And a part of Yugi wishes Seto would allow himself to enjoy sugary flavors too. He’d realized a while ago Seto always chose plain coffee because it was the most “adult” choice.  
“Once when I was really little, I took a pair of my mom’s high heels and I was walking around the house with them on. And then Grandpa saw me and I got worried I was in trouble, but instead he took another pair of Mom’s high heels and then we went walking around the house with them on together,” Yugi says.  
“Hm.” It was a gentle sound Seto would make when he listened to Yugi.  
“At some point I got taller than Grandpa. Mom stood us up back to back when she first noticed it, and she pressed down on our hair to our heads to see for sure.”  
It’s evening and the café would be closing soon. The barista is the only other person there and she counts yen from the register. The glass door refrigerator hums like a tiny cicada.  
“Mokuba’s gotten… tall,” Seto says.  
“How tall are you, Kaiba-kun?”  
“One-hundred-eighty-six centimeters.”  
“How tall is Mokuba-kun now?”  
“I don’t know. A bit shorter than that.” He moves his arm to place his napkin onto his empty plate and his elbow knocks into his coffee cup.  
“Ah!” Yugi gasps as the earthy drink sprays over his own plate and drips onto his pants.  
“Dammit!” Seto hisses as he stands to grab a fistful of paper napkins. “Dammit!”  
“It’s okay,” Yugi says as he stands to help, using his own napkin to soak in the liquid.  
“ _Stupid_ ,” Seto growls under his breath, furiously swiping at the spill, flinging droplets across the counter.  
And Yugi watches his friend scrubbing at the mess, those tired stone-blue eyes, and he isn’t sure what to say.

A melody of rain plays as they walk through the tunnel towards the parking garage, Yugi following behind Seto. The florescent lights in the ceiling douse them in clarity. The city sparkles in the storm, smears of neon glow in the paintbrush of night. And suddenly the sky becomes bright and a deep rumble moves through the landscape. Yugi stops walking.  
“Hey, Kaiba-kun… let’s watch the storm for a bit,” he says.  
And he’s a little surprised that Seto stops walking and turns to see the world.  
It’s an opulence of early summer to watch a blade of lightning harvest the violet sky, to hear that strange bellow of the clouds. There’s a slight rattle in the tunnel as the bellow passes. When Yugi glances to Seto, he catches Seto looking back and Seto quickly turns to the window trying to hide.  
“… I like you, Kaiba-kun.”  
He says it quietly, perhaps too quietly for Seto to hear. The sky flares again and they wait for the sound to crash.  
“Whenever there was a lightning storm, I used to wish a bolt would strike the house when I was a kid…” Seto says, “But the place had a lightning rod anyway.”  
“… I hope you can relax at home better now,” Yugi says clearly.  
“Hm.”  
The rain becomes harder, like glass marbles, and it pelts hard against the roof of the tunnel, and then it softens again.  
“If you want to go, we can,” Yugi tells him, “It’s getting late. I don’t mean to hold you up.”  
Suddenly Seto turns to Yugi and he puts a hand to the top of Yugi’s head, presses gently on his hair down to his scalp.  
“H-hey-!” Yugi jerks away a small bit.  
“Your hair is ridiculous,” Seto says, resting his hand to his side again.  
“The humidity makes it worse,” Yugi replies, patting the place Seto touched.  
“You’ve accomplished nothing these past two hours besides chit-chatting to me. What did you come to my office for today?”  
“It’s been a long day already. We can do business stuff tomorrow,” Yugi says.  
Yugi still feels Seto’s hand pressing to his scalp, although the moment of contact had been so fleeting.  
“It’s a waste of your time.” Seto’s words are softer than usual.  
“It’s not a waste. I like spending time with you.”  
“Hmph.”  
Yugi strikes a proud pose. “Relaxation time is important for being more productive.”  
Seto is already walking away by now. “Let’s go already.”

The insides of the parking garage are dimmer than the insides of the tunnel, all moon-grey concrete. Seto pulls out his keys and the lights of a handsome black car flash in his reserved space.  
“I’ll stop by tomorrow to tell you the details of the new game I’m developing,” Yugi says.  
“Ah-ha; you were here for business all along,” Seto says tonelessly as he opens the front door to his car.  
Yugi steps closer to him as Seto ducks inside behind the wheel.  
“Kaiba-kun.”  
And Seto looks at him, and Seto’s eyes are blue and lustrous like the storm.  
“… … Have a good night, Kaiba-kun.”  
“… You too, Yugi.”  
And Seto shuts the door and turns on the engine. And the world is filled with humming sound.


End file.
